If you are a content creator trying to reach a global audience, you should aim for high-quality streaming with excellent speed and low latency. To ensure good playback speed and seamless streaming of live and on-demand content, you need to reduce the burden on the origin servers. This is taken care of by video CDNs. 

In this blog, we analyze the top 7 CDNs to help you choose the best one.

What is a Video CDN?

A video Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers that deliver video content by caching it. This is done to ensure that viewers have a seamless viewing experience without any lag or buffering. 

Videos consume a significant amount of bandwidth, and without a CDN, viewers may experience disruptions in their streaming experience. CDN follows adaptive bitrate streaming to adjust the quality of delivery according to the viewer’s internet speed.

Videos are delivered across geographical locations, and as a result, there is a possibility of delay. To avoid this latency, video files are cached on different servers. This enables streaming platforms to deliver buffer-free content and good playback speed across devices.

Benefits of using a CDN for Video Streaming

1. Bandwidth cost reduction

When data is directly transferred from the origin server, it consumes a significant amount of bandwidth, thereby increasing the cost. Using a CDN, video files are cached on multiple servers in different geographical locations. This reduces bandwidth cost significantly.

2. Low latency in streaming

There is a time delay during the transfer of data between servers that can disrupt a seamless viewing experience, especially during live events. CDN reduces latency in streaming, offering an enjoyable experience to viewers. 

3. Improves scalability

Due to the network of servers being scattered across locations, it becomes easy for streaming platforms to cater to more viewers without affecting the quality of streaming.

4. Improved security

CDN prevents DDoS attacks and protects content streamers from unauthorised access to data. Content tokenisation and watermarking help protect the content creators. Customer information is also protected through a web application firewall.

5. High-quality video delivery

With encoding and compression of videos, viewers can enjoy high-quality streaming, even for high resolutions like 4K and VR. 

List Of Top 7 Best Video CDN Providers You Should Consider In 2026

1. Fastly

One of the popular CDNs, Fastly, is built using modern architecture, real-time observability, and built-in security. It offers low-latency streaming, caches a wide range of content, and improves scalability.

• It offers built-in security, including DDoS, next-gen WAF, and TLS.
• Fastly offers seamless rollback of changes in configuration.
• It offers AI-driven analysis for real-time insights about streaming quality.
• Enables more content to be cached using powerful POPs and lightning-fast purging.

Pricing

It has different pricing structures, namely, Basic, Starter, Advantage, and Ultimate, based on the volume of business.

2. Cloudflare

Cloudflare is known to deliver buffer-free, low-latency streaming across the world. With its modern technologies, it offers highly secure and superfast delivery of content. 

• It offers unlimited DDoS protection and regular attack alerts.
• Helps build custom firewall rules to protect your web properties.
• It offers real-time latency maps and detailed traffic analysis.
• Uses AI-powered video encoding to save bandwidth usage.

Pricing

It offers a free plan for beginners, a pro plan ($25/month) for less-critical businesses, and a business plan ($250/month) for businesses that need ultra speed and security.

3. Amazon CloudFront

It is another popular CDN that enables fast downloads of large files, supports live and on-demand content delivery with improved security.

• It uses traffic encryption, access controls, and AWS Shield Standard to protect against DDoS attacks.
• With over 700 PoPs, it reduces latency in streaming.
• It offers customizable pricing options and a zero transfer fee for those with AWS origins.
• Its feature-rich AWS network supports edge termination, gRPC, and web sockets.
• With built-in data compression and edge compute features, streaming is ultra-fast to reach audiences across the globe.

Pricing

• The free tier allows 1 TB of data transfer
• There is a pro plan ($15/ month), a Business plan ($200/month), a Premium plan ($1000/month), and a custom plan.

4. Akamai

With a range of advanced features, Akamai is one of the largest in the CDN arena. It enables easy management of bulk data transfer along with maintaining high-level security.

• It has a wide network of edge servers across the world.
• It offers distributed AI inference that reduces latency in streaming.
• Ultimate security with bot and abuse protection, and comprehensive coverage and deep visibility with zero trust protection.
• It has pre-built edge applications that enable functionalities on CDN to improve efficiency.
• Provides a consistent user experience online.

Pricing

Akamai offers a tiered, volume-based pricing model and custom enterprise pricing. 

5. KeyCDN

This futuristic CDN offers high performance and super-fast delivery of data. It offers advanced security with AI-powered optimizations for caching data.

• Its hardware has an advanced TCP stack with 100% SSD coverage.
• Latency-based routing technology helps provide a seamless delivery of video files.
• Edge servers are preloaded with content for faster and buffer-free delivery.
• Helps developers upload content without any downtime.
• Uses adaptive bitrate streaming for seamless playback across locations.
• It offers powerful analytics and real-time tracking.

Pricing

Prices differ region-wise. The slab is divided as first 10TB, next 40TB, next 50 TB, and over 100 TB per month. 

6. Microsoft Azure

It is a popular CDN worldwide and offers an optimal user experience. For high-bandwidth content, request is distributed among servers and delivery is done from edge servers, enabling low-latency streaming.

• Handles sudden high loads globally with its scalable CDN and reduces downtime.
• Offers complete security against DDoS and WAF attacks.
• It offers improved responsiveness and reduces load time for websites and mobile apps.
• Edge servers take the front and offer a hedge for origin servers. Geo-filtering and other validation requests enhance security.
• Unified API to deploy a custom CDN from each provider.

Pricing

Pricing is dependent on data transfer and request volume. It is also different region-wise. Azure offers a pricing calculator on its website to estimate costs.

7. Google Cloud CDN

Google Cloud CDN enables faster content delivery to a global audience. Using the edge network to improve web applications reduces web traffic spikes.

• It offers easy integration with third-party CDNs. 
• Provides universal support for content from any origin outside Google Cloud. 
• Content at the edge is protected with Cloud Armor.
• Offers cache control through filtering by the origin of data.
• Provided real-time metrics to understand how web traffic is handled.
• Offers advanced HTTP routing capabilities that help send traffic to certain edge servers.

Pricing

Google Cloud CDN pricing is based on cache fill, number of lookup requests, and bandwidth.

Points to note while choosing a CDN

• Look for a CDN provider capable of handling advanced streaming such as 4K, 6K and VR.
• The CDN should be scalable and handle traffic spikes efficiently without any disruption in content quality.
• It should offer advanced security features to defend against DDoS and other attacks.
• It should offer global coverage with strategically located servers.
• It should be flexible and allow customization according to client needs.

Conclusion

The above-listed are the top 7 Content Delivery Networks. Choosing the best one depends on various factors and your needs. Look for the most important features: buffer-free, low-latency streaming, and complete protection. Analyze each video CDN to ensure your scalability and consistently reliable performance. 

There are various CDNs offering a free tier pricing for your trial. You can explore each one and get started with the best.